Gradulthood Jobs: The Christmas Song.

This could be you!

Most other grad-something websites have a section for jobs, so we thought we’d have a go as well. This came to me last Sunday whilst listening to the ‘Official Top 40’ on Radio 1:

Why don’t all Gradults try and write a Christmas song?

If you worked 9-5 every day for a year writing a Christmas song that makes it into the ‘Top 40’ annually, you could be making anything from £9,000 upwards. per annum. It’d have to be a great song, but still.

After a little bit of - if I’m honest - rather enjoyable research, I discovered there were 11 Christmas songs in the UK ‘Top 100’ last week (19/12/2010). The following four made it into the ‘Top 40’, two of which are new this year:

Coldplay-Christmas lights

Mariah Carey-All I want for Christmas is you

The Pogues-Fairytale of New York

Corey Taylor X-M@$

But once you venture outside of the ‘Top 40’, the other seven are all timeless classics from artists such as Wizzard, Slade, Wham and Chris Rea, that have been appearing in the charts once a year, every year since they were released, and will probably continue to do so until the end of time.

Matt Cardle’s X-Factor single made it to number 1 this year. It cost £3.99 in the shops and sold just under half a million in the first six days, which means it made just under £2,000,000! However, unless you’ve got the X-Factor bandwagon behind you, a hard copy of a single will usually cost about £1.99 and a download about 99p. From here on in the statistics are a bit vague; but apparently you need to sell around 4,000 singles to get into the ‘Top 40’, 20,000 for the ‘Top 10’ and 100,000 for a Number 1. They’re the statistics for a week of sales though so you’d obviously sell more than that in the festive fortnight.

To get back to the point, what I’m suggesting is this, pen an all time classic Christmas song, do a tour of your local book shop, get it on your local radio, then I reckon you could make anything from £9,000 a year*. Who needs a proper job? I’ll be starting on mine after a visit to the Christmas market later today…

*based on an estimation of about 30,000 singles sold over the festive period, at an average of £1.20 a single, with the artist getting about a quarter of all revenue.

BONUS STAT: The Yeo Valley rap is sitting quietly at number 73 in the charts!